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Research: A ‘Media Diet’ Can Lead to Less Aggressive Behavior in Children

When researchers helped parents choose a better “media diet” for 3- to 5-year-olds, the results were encouraging. In a randomized trial, the children who watched less violent programs and whose parents paid closer attention to what the children were watching were less aggressive than those in a control group, and they scored higher on “measures of social competence” as much as a year later.

“The take-home message for parents is it’s not just about turning off the TV; it’s about changing the channel,” Dimitri A. Christakis, the lead author of the study and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington, told The Times’s reporter Catherine Saint Louis. She reported on the research on the Well blog, and spoke with one of the parents who participated in the trial.

Until she began participating in Dr. Christakis’s trial, Nancy Jensen, a writer in Seattle, had never heard of shows like Nickelodeon’s “Wonder Pets!,” featuring cooperative team players, and NBC’s “My Friend Rabbit,” with its themes of loyalty and friendship.

At the time, her daughter Elizabeth, then 3, liked “King of the Hill,” a cartoon comedy geared toward adults that features beer and gossip. In hindsight, she said, the show was “hilariously funny, but completely inappropriate for a 3-year-old.”

These days, she consults Common Sense Media, a nonprofit advocacy group in San Francisco, to make sure that the shows her daughter watches have some prosocial benefit. Elizabeth, now 6, was “not necessarily an aggressive kid,” Ms. Jensen said. Still, the girl’s teacher recently commended her as very considerate, and Ms. Jensen believes a better television diet is an important reason.

It may be a little mind-boggling that anyone would consider “King of the Hill” preschool programming, but it’s that casual approach to what works for children that marks the mind-set the researchers were tackling with their proposed changes in viewing. There is nothing overtly violent about “King of the Hill,” but it is a show filled with various kinds of conflict that resolve themselves only for a viewer capable of following the plot.

As silly as it sounds, PBS’s “Arthur” presents similar problems for a young child, one researcher suggested — not because it’s a shoot-’em-up drama in disguise, but also because a young child can easily stop watching before the conflict is resolved. The suggestion is that children absorb the angry ways characters deal with one another, but not the lessons that may come at the end (for “Arthur,” if not “King of the Hill”).

My children talk back more after they overdose on Disney programming that finds its humor in the “children are smarter than their parents” trope. They’re bossier and less pleasant to one another if we watch movies where characters interact that way — which can range from “Star Wars” to “Toy Story.”

How do your children absorb the media they watch, and does a “media diet” help?

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We're all living the family dynamic, as parents, as children, as siblings, uncles and aunts. At Motherlode, lead writer and editor KJ Dell’Antonia invites contributors and commenters to explore how our families affect our lives, and how the news affects our families—and all families. Join us to talk about education, child care, mealtime, sports, technology, the work-family balance and much more